Damian left the kitchen at ten forty.
Not because the conversation was over. Because he understood, reading the specific quality of the silence that had settled after the Isabelle Monroe exchange, that what needed to happen next belonged to Kendrick and Richard alone.
He stood.
"I'll be in the garden," he said.
Neither man spoke.
He went outside.
The garden was everything it looked like through the window — precise, maintained, shaped by decades of careful attention. Beds arranged with the particular logic of someone who had thought about sight lines and seasonal color and the way a space changed as you moved through it.
Damian walked the path that ran along the east wall.
He thought about *he doesn't grieve. He builds.*
He thought about Cecelia in the beds that had been planted the year after she died. Not literally — there was no way to know the planting dates. But the garden had that quality. Things built in the shape of something.
He thought about the kitchen.
